


Remastered

by Lafayette1777



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Nighmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, bed sharing of course, everyone's a disaster, everyone's alive except K2 sorry, except bodhi, he's got his shit together, heavy on the rebelcaptain, mon mothma means well but jyn is full of rage as per usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 17:59:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9336098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: There are many ways to die. Incidentally, there are also many ways to disappear.Or: Jyn discovers life to be far more troublesome than death.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is a disaster i am a disaster everything's a disaster
> 
> so I wrote a fix-it fic like I said I would after Let It Happen but it got fucking angsty. now I have another fix-it idea so brb while I go write that also.

_It’s beautiful._

_Her hand is in his, but it’s not enough. She reaches for him, and he buries his face in her shoulder. Her heart beats against his, wildly at first, before settling into a quieter, smoother rhythm. She’s with him. Odd, the kind of succor that fact provides. Somewhere far, far above them, a battle rages, a fire burns. Hope rises._

_There is a haze of light and sound on the horizon. It glows like a dying sun, or perhaps one that’s just been reborn. It’s beautiful, it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, and soon it will arrive to sweep them away. He holds onto her tighter._

_It’s beautiful, and it’s coming for them; now it’s here._

 

 

It has often been said that no one can know the true nature of the future; that it is always obscured by the present. For Jyn Erso, though, there are a few things she thought she could count on, a few inevitabilities that at least the most primal part of her brain understood. She had known, on some level, the kind of life she had been living. She had known that death would come for her before it came for others her age, that it would likely be painful, that she would likely be alone.

So, to put it mildly, none of her current reality quite makes sense. 

Perhaps this life is not her own. 

A few moments ago, she had been ready to die in the same way she had lived, though with one key difference: she had not been alone. Cassian’s stilted, pained breaths had stirred the hairs at the nape of her neck as they embraced. It’d been a long time since she’d been so enveloped by another person. Despite her surprise at the twist of a death less than solitary, it was a fate she understood. This was her life, and it was ending. 

Now, though, things are different. 

Bodhi makes a tight left turn just as they break atmo, and her fingers grasp for purchase on the slick wall of the transport ship. She watches Cassian’s face contort in pain with each sharp bank, each sudden acceleration. She’s laid him out on the flattest stretch of the cargo hold she can find, but now he just looks ragged and fragile against the industrial floor, salted lightly with white sand. 

Her back presses against Baze’s, whose weathered hands are moving swiftly across the wound in Chirrut’s chest. There’s a murmur in the air, too. _The Force is with me and I am one with the Force._ At first, she thinks it must be Chirrut, but he’s unconscious. She squints, and can see Baze’s lips moving, wrapping softly around each syllable as he applies pressure to Chirrut’s wound. Despite the chaos outside, she lets the familiar mantra fill her head, just as the hellscape outside blurs into hyperspace. 

_The Force is with me and I am one with the Force._

She still grips Cassian’s hand. 

Eventually, Bodhi puts on the autopilot and limps out of the pilot’s seat. His left arm looks badly burned, but the way he’s cradling it to his chest means she can’t see the extent of the damage. He seems to be shaking, but it’s possible she is, too. The world is a little out of focus. 

“We’re en route to Yavin IV,” Bodhi says finally, his voice raw. He sits down on one of the steps leading into the cockpit, and surveys them. His lips press together, for a moment, like he might say something, but then he seems to think better of it. Instead, he just closes his eyes and breathes. 

“Did you see anyone else make it out?” Cassian asks, and it seems to take an enormous effort. For a second, Jyn thinks she sees blood on his teeth, on the inside of his bottom lip. Maybe she’s imagined it. 

“I don’t know.” Bodhi takes another long breath. “You were the only ones left on the beach that I saw.”

Jyn, without any conscious thought, beckons him toward her until she can slide an arm around his shoulders, careful not to jostle his left arm. Bodhi slumps against her, the stress of the last few hours finally turning to well earned exhaustion. 

Without looking up from Chirrut, Baze asks, “Did you transmit the plans?”

“We did,” Jyn replies. “They heard us.”

It doesn’t feel like as much as triumph as it did a few minutes ago. She’d made the mistake of looking back, before they’d accelerated into lightspeed, and all she’d seen behind them was a world imploding. Sitting, now, on the floor of an Imperial freighter, surrounded by four people still fighting for breath, whatever victory that floats between them feels only nebulous and breakable and very, very far away. 

Baze uses a free hand to caress her shoulder in comfort. Chirrut, cradled in his other arm, is soaked in blood but undeniably breathing. It’s odd to see them all alive. Odd to feel each breath her lungs take and know that she is alive, too. 

She looks down, and notices Cassian’s hand has gone limp in hers. 

 

 

Chaos awaits them on Yavin IV, but it’s different than the kind she’s used to—there’s something organized about it that only discombobulates her further. She loses Cassian in it, in the swarm of emergency medicine that descends upon their ship the moment it lands. It’s not long before she loses herself, too, only to pop up later in a medbay, covered in bacta and bandages. Someone has cleaned the grime off her face and the sand from beneath her nails. She has very little memory of any of it. 

Sitting up on the thin cot is beside her is Bodhi, who seems to have recently been pulled from a bacta tank. His hair is loose and wet, and what she can see of the once burned skin on his arm and shoulder is now pink and new. His eyes, though, are hollow; he’s staring at the wall, unmoving. 

“Bodhi,” she breathes, the words crackling in the dry cavern of her mouth. Her throat is raw, and a headache pulses behind her eyes. “Where’s everyone else? Cassian?”

His eyes dart to her, but don’t seem to focus. He seems closer to the pilot they pulled out of Saw Gerrera’s camp then the rebel she knew on Scarif. 

“Bodhi,” she says evenly, slowly beginning to disentangle herself from her own cot, stripping off patches and heart rate monitors and a number of nameless electrodes. They’ve confiscated some of her outermost layers, leaving her feeling uncharacteristically exposed. Still, she continues, “Bodhi, we’re alright. You’re alright. We’re back on Yavin. You’re safe.”

Hesitantly, she lets her feet touch the floor, adding weight in increments to her damaged leg. There’s a twinge of pain in her hip once she’s standing upright, but the bacta seems to have done it’s job. Her mobility, for the most part, is restored. Everything else, as far as she can tell, is minor—just an array of fresh purple bruises in every imaginable spot and a soreness in every extremity that seems impossibly marrow-deep. 

Bodhi’s brow has furrowed, like he’s trying to call himself back from some far away place and is meeting internal resistance. Jyn fixes him with a look, but says nothing. This is not her forte; she’s dwelt so long in the dark places it’s hard to imagine pulling herself out of them, much less someone else. 

“I’m the pilot,” Bodhi says, after a long moment. His eyes begin to clear. 

“I’d be dead if you weren’t,” says Jyn, and feels her bottom lip begin to tremble. She quickly pulls it into a grimace to steady it. Death had come for her. It’d been there, with them, on the beach. She’d evaded it. If there’s meaning in that, a truth she is meant to extract from the fact of her survival, than she’s already afraid of it. 

She slips her hands into her pockets so that she doesn’t have to watch them shake. 

Cassian is a few pods down, swathed in crisp linens and drug-absorption patches. He’s asleep. Jyn’s never seen his face so smooth, so unmarred by stress and fear and anger. He’s hardly recognizable. She watches his chest move up and down a few times, places two fingers against the pulse in his neck. Satisfied, finally, she lets out a breath and collapses into the nearest chair. The relief tears through her; leaves something weak and exhausted behind it. She had been ready for death. Maybe she’s ready for sleep, too. 

 

 

It’s four broken ribs, a punctured spleen, and a left leg fractured in three places. He tells her he’s not in pain, but she knows he’s a good liar. She stays with him, in part because she’s not sure where else to go—it seems likely they expect her to still be in a hospital bed somewhere, but prolonged rest is not something she can contemplate right now. There’s still too much Scarif air in her lungs. 

Eventually, Bodhi comes in and sits with her. They don’t say much, but they don’t sleep either. Cassian is the only one who dares shut his eyes, apparently convinced that he’s got enough painkillers in his system for sleep to be pleasantly dreamless. 

“I’ve seen Chirrut and Baze,” Bodhi says, that first morning. “I think—I think they’re fine, actually.”

“I think we all are,” Jyn says, a puzzled frown twisting her mouth. Cassian is awake; there’s even a little color back in his face. His eyes, though, are oddly impassive. Any joy at the notion of being alive seems to have been supplanted by bafflement. And, in Cassian’s case, something darker—something she can’t quite place. 

By the afternoon, Mon Mothma floats in, practically glowing in the dimness of the room. She says, “You’ll be interested to know that the plans you extracted are en route to us. We’re already putting together a strike team for an attack on the Death Star as soon as they arrive.” Finally, her expression softens. “I realize we owe you quite a bit. And, Jyn, though I’m aware that our original offer was your freedom, there is a place for you here, if you want it. And for you, Bodhi.”

Jyn keeps her expression carefully neutral, and says nothing. 

“Regardless of whether you decide to enlist or not, we’ve allotted some quarters for you to stay in for now. I’d recommend sticking around for at least the time being, since it’ll be much easier to move through the galaxy once there’s no Death Star to contend with.” The smile she gives isn’t quite as confident as her words are. In her peripheral vision, she sees Cassian narrow his eyes. 

“I’d like to enlist,” Bodhi says immediately, and Jyn’s head swivels to look at him. His eyes are the clearest they’ve been since they left Scarif air space. 

Mon Mothma’s smile gains a little momentum. “I’ll inform high command.”

Once she’s gone, Bodhi turns to meet Jyn’s stare.

“Why did you do that?” she asks, keeping her voice a low, even murmur.

“I was part of the Empire for a long time.” Bodhi’s eyes land on the floor. “I have some things to make up for.”

_Is this really the way to do that?_ she wants to ask. But, for Cassian’s sake, she just nods. 

Cassian, however, seems far away—his dark gaze is locked on an empty corner of the room, his head limp against the pillows. It’s a long time before he registers her fingers reaching for his. 

 

 

The room is a meager double, populated by only a bunk bed and a tiny kitchen-like console in the opposite corner. They’re lucky, apparently, to not be crammed into a six man barrack on one of the lower levels. Space on the Yavin base is at a premium these days, but their callsign seems to have gained some useful notoriety. People are beginning to stare at her in the halls. They step out of her way.

Cassian is still limping, so she gifts him the bottom bunk and tosses her rucksack haphazardly onto the top one. He sits down stiffly on the thin mattress, and she watches his eyes flicker around the room. Still collecting data, assessing hiding places. 

“There’s a good crevice between the cabinet and the wall for storing things discreetly,” Jyn remarks. She’d made her own assessment of their new digs on the way in. “Just in case.”

He smiles softly. It’s still a ragged expression. “I was thinking the same thing.”

They manage to fit two snub nose blasters and a vibroblade into the crevice before stepping back to admire their handiwork. There’s a tiny window in the wall above their heads; she can feel warm sunlight prickling the back of her neck exposed by a messy bun. Eventually, she feels Cassian’s warm hand there, too, smoothing the hairs at her nape. The room is small, he is close—she knows the moment their eyes meet something is going to happen, she just doesn’t yet know what. 

Incidentally, though, there’s some sort of commotion in the hall—they hear it at the same time, and the spell breaks. Jyn’s hand goes to the brass knuckles in her back pocket, and Cassian’s already at the door. In the corridor, Cassian limps and Jyn jogs and then they’re in the hangar, watching a shout erupt from all undeployed forces. Baze and Chirrut are a few feet away, and Jyn bounds up to them. 

“What’s happened?” Jyn asks, already breathless with fear. “Where’s Bodhi?”

“I believe he’s on the mission that just destroyed the Death Star,” Chirrut says gravely, then his face spreads into a wry grin. 

She sucks in a breath. “It’s gone?”

“It’s dust,” Baze says. His cynicism, for a moment, seems to have disappeared. “The Force was with us.”

Cassian is standing a few feet away, leaning on a stack of empty bacta barrels, but he’s heard Chirrut anyways. The look of shock on his face surely mirrors her own. His eyes land on her, and something crackles between them; she realizes, belatedly, that if they were different people in a different time that this is the moment where she would fly into his kiss, where they would meld together in front of the entire Rebellion. It would be a show; someone, she imagines, would probably clap. 

But he is a spy and she is thief—they are not meant for the eyes of others. 

Instead, they stumble toward each other like shadows, lost in the light and dark of Rebellion’s celebration, and crash into an embrace. He buries his face in her neck, and she feels his breath against the skin of her neck. It’s a lot like Scarif, she realizes. A lot like the moments she thought were going to be her last. She feels herself begin to come undone at the thought, and holds him tighter. 

 

 

This is not the kind of life she has lived in a long, long time. 

The nature of their room means that it’s impossible to move in space without, at the very least, rubbing shoulders. In the tightest corner, they must slide past each other sideways, Jyn’s eyes inevitably falling to the sliver of skin visible around Cassian’s collar, just below his throat. Often, his hand lands on the small of her back or her hip as he moves around the room; she tells herself it is a necessity, a courtesy, and nothing else. 

The shared space, however perplexing, is pleasant in it’s own way. They keep each other awake into the wee hours, talking about all the things they thought they wouldn’t have time for, until they’re so tired they won’t dream. She learns where he’s from; the language he spoke to his parents, when he had them; the path of destruction that lead him here. They both manage to say more, after midnight. The liquor helps, too. Occasionally, they even manage to laugh. Sometimes she can’t make it up to her own bunk and collapses onto his, wrapped up in his limbs and his breath and the things he’s told her. 

In the morning, they just look at each other, still halfway submerged in sleep. Sometimes he murmurs in a language she doesn’t understand, his lips just millimeters away, her hand resting against his heartbeat. Sometimes there are words on the tip of her tongue, but they never come. 

And he’s always the first to leave, slipping out into the morning sun and into a world that is not hers. 

 

 

Cassian has yet to be cleared for active duty; he still limps. She hasn’t yet worked up the courage to ask whether he always will. There’s an old shoulder injury too, she knows, that bothers him in the mornings when he’s still stiff from sleep. She often retrieves his jacket off the high hook so she doesn’t have to see his hand shake trying to reach for it himself. 

“I think we’re going to move to Hoth,” he says one day, over lunch in the mess. Active duty or not, he still attends the morning intelligence briefing. “For security reasons.”

Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze are seated around the same table. The five of them have been gravitating toward each other in this strange place. Strange to four of them, at least. She’s developing a theory that K2 may have been Cassian’s only persistent companion, and that a scowling man and his three meter tall murder droid may not have been terribly inviting. 

“Hoth?” Baze asks, frowning.

“Ice,” says Chirrut, with distaste. 

“And then what?” asks Jyn. 

Cassian fixes her with an unreadable look. “Then I get new missions. New orders.”

There’s something about the way he says it, though. Something about the hollowness of his voice, the slump of his shoulders. It keeps her from asking, _And then what for me?_

“We keep taking chances,” Bodhi says. There is no fear in his eyes. 

In her peripheral vision, she sees Baze spare a glance at Chirrut, and Chirrut’s lip curl up in a clandestine smile in response. The change of scenery worries her; the universe suddenly feels much more foreign than it ever has before. Even if this base is strange, it is a known quantity, and there’s a table for her family to sit around and remind each other of their survival. Hoth, for better or for worse, will be different. 

Cassian lays a hand on the small of her back, and won’t meet her eyes. 

 

 

The air on the base has changed, she realizes—the victory, however temporary, has infected every corner. The retrieval of the Death Star plans is no longer her own triumph to celebrate, or her father’s. The Rebellion owns it. Perhaps it always has. 

In the absence of any better idea, and as a reflection of her indecision regarding exactly where she fits into this organization, she starts to pick up a few menial jobs during the day. Taking apart blasters, cleaning them, putting them back together. When she’s up for it, she helps load cargo on it’s way to Hoth, in an attempt to gain back some of the muscle she’d lost while on Wobani prison rations. She doesn’t have to wear as many layers to look substantial, now, but it’s always useful to look a little bulkier than you are. 

However, she can’t stop the stares. Can’t even, really, find their source. Eyes, somehow, manage to follow her at all times, whether it’s because of Rogue One or because of her last name, she isn’t sure. 

Sometimes, when she’s in the main hangar, she finds herself standing beneath ships she recognizes. Ships she could fly. Ships that, with a little fuel and a little motivation, could cross rather great distances. Could wrinkle time and space at her will, and deposit her wherever she asks. 

One overcast morning, she finds Cassian beside her. 

She’s afraid to look at him; maybe she already knows what he’s going to say. 

“They’re sending me out tomorrow morning,” he says, voice expressionless. His arms are folded tight over his chest. “There’s an informant on Jakku I’ve worked with before; she might have a few leads as to where what remains of Imperial high command are hiding out.”

Jyn says nothing.

“It’ll be quick.”

Her eyes follow the boxy, faded lines outlining the cargo door on the ship in front of her. 

“You can have the bottom bunk in my absence.”

Finally, she turns her gaze on him, and evidently it’s not as impassive as she thinks it is. His lips twist around a scowl. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Or do. This is the life I know.” He closes his mouth abruptly after the last syllable, but she’s already heard the shake in his voice. His eyes squeeze shut. 

“It never ends, does it?” she asks, after a long moment. The Death Star is gone, but the struggle continues. Maybe it always will. There’s something eternal in the notion of a rebellion, something ceaseless and reactionary and exhausting. It’s easier to fight, she imagines, than it is to fight back. 

“I don’t know,” he lets out, finally. “Not for me.”

 

 

That night, they don’t speak. Cassian packs a bag, shaves off a few days worth of stubble around his goatee. She falls into bed like a child, as soon as the sun sets, almost convinced that twenty years of fighting will buy her one full night’s sleep. 

It doesn’t. 

She doesn’t know how long she lasts, but she wakes up sobbing. Like the shock that has been making her hands shake at inopportune times over the last few weeks has finally come spilling forth into the tangible realm. Her father is dead, Saw is dead. She is alive. She remembers a beach; she thinks she was probably meant to die on it. 

From below her, a quiet voice asks, “Jyn?”

_Perhaps this life is not her own._

She opens her mouth to respond but only another sob, dry and ragged, escapes. A moment passes, and then Cassian appears, sliding in beside her. The climb up the ladder must have hurt—he rubs absently at his thigh, looking at her but hesitant, it seems, to reach out. It’s only when she leans against him that he allows himself to coil around her, to press his forehead to hers and let their breaths meld together. It’s unclear, for a moment, who’s comforting who.

“I’m sorry,” he says, voice barely a whisper. “For your father. For all of this.”

Somehow, they have managed to end up in that familiar embrace, except instead of sand beneath them it’s twisted mass of bedding. Somewhere along the line, she realizes, she has become rather obsessed with her own almost-death. 

“Please come back,” she says, once her breaths have begun to even out again. “Please don’t leave me here alone.”

He leaves before dawn.

 

 

There are a few things she hasn’t told him, or anyone, just as she imagines there are a few things that have never made it past his lips, either. It’s not for a lack of trust—just an acknowledgement that there are pieces of one’s self that must remain unshared in the hope that one day they can pass into nonexistence, remembered by none.

This is one of those things:

Before Wobani, she’d been serving her sentence on an asteroid belt that ringed some Rim planet they’d never bothered to tell her the name of. The asteroids were the important part—there was something rare and valuable inside, something whose name they only knew as “the paydirt.” All the more dexterous and able droids were serving in posts far more strategically significant, so the mining was left to prisoners, crammed into obsolete space suits and forced to hammer away at their assigned rock. Often, her oxygen tank would run dangerously low before the end of her shift, and she’d be seeing spots by the time she stripped off her gear. She was expendable, she knew, and easily replaced. 

The lines tethering them to the known universe were old, too. Sometimes they split, or were accidentally cut. Sometimes she watched while prisoners, in a spacesuit identical to hers, drifted off into the black. Into nothing. 

And, sometimes, she envied them. 

 

 

By the time her transport to Hoth is scheduled to leave, Cassian has not yet returned from Jakku. She gathers his things along with hers, and departs Yavin IV without looking back. 

She and a dozen Rebellion fighters are crammed into a long range personnel transport, operated by Bodhi and a woman she doesn’t recognize. She doesn’t recognize any of them, actually—the men and women who surround her are strangers in every sense of the word. They all possess an air of purpose, of impatience. Their missions await; Jyn stares at her lap. 

Chirrut and Baze have left on an earlier ship, but she hadn’t seen them take off—they’d come by her room in the early hours, buoyant and ready, and for some reason the tears had gathered in her eyes. She would see them again, she reminded herself. It would only be a few days. 

Something uncertain had twisted in her gut. 

“Find your path, Jyn Erso,” Chirrut had said, eyes directed somewhere over her left shoulder. 

She’d barely been able to nod without her lip trembling dangerously. 

“It’ll be alright, little sister,” Baze added, squeezing her hand. 

She said, her voice small, “I’ll see you on Hoth.”

“If the Force wills it,” said Chirrut, and smiled serenely. 

Now, in the belly of this unknown ship, she feels their absence keenly—she already knows that whatever the five of them shared on Yavin cannot be replicated anywhere else. She rises stiffly to her feet and drifts toward the cockpit, where she can lean against Bodhi’s chair and watch the stars streak into nameless, unfathomable light. 

Bodhi reaches up to pat the hand she’s laid casually over his shoulder. He’s laughing at something the woman next to him has said—her name tag, over the pocket on her right breast, reads _Bey_ —and everything about him is loose and soft and in control. 

While this life may not be her own, it is definitely his. 

 

 

On Hoth, the room she is allotted is another double, but without the bunk beds. Instead, it’s one large bed, with flaccid looking pillows and a tiny end table on each side of the headboard. The rest of the room is as unremarkable as the one on Yavin, but she manages to find a new hiding spot for their weapons stash. 

Bodhi finds her a pair of fluffy white earmuffs as a joke, but Hoth is so inhospitable that she takes to wearing them in almost every waking moment. She goes back to the menial work she’d grown used to on Yavin, happy to have something to do with her hands. If she stays busy enough, she doesn’t have to think. 

The nights, however, remain an issue. 

Without the murmur of his voice, the shift in the air brought just by his presence, the room is impossibly empty. When she wakes in the night, screaming and clawing at the bedding and herself, there are no human sounds to ground her in life and reality. No quiet in and out of his breath. She closes her eyes, and she’s right back in it—her father dies in her arms. _Jyn, I have so much to tell you._ Bodhi drowns in fire and blood. Chirrut and Baze are lost in a haze of light and heat. Cassian falls down twelve stories, but doesn’t get back up. Cassian is shot in the chest; she watches the blood spread across him as he fades away. Cassian lies on a beach; the red tide comes in and floats him off, out of her grip. 

She works as many shifts as possible; avoids the emptiness of the room. She and Bodhi have lunch in the crowded new mess, but sometimes she skips dinner and he eats with other people, people she doesn’t know—pilots and fighters and the like, she supposes. The life of the Rebellion has infected him; he smiles at people in the corridor, waves to friends across the room. 

Jyn, in her earmuffs, asks, “Have you seen Chirrut and Baze?”

Bodhi, still chewing on something gray and protein-filled, replies, “I haven’t, actually. Not since Yavin. They—they came by my room, said they were heading out.” He frowns. “Do you know what they’re up to? Have they been assigned somewhere?”

She thinks about it, for a moment, then shakes her head. She’s not sure whether to smile or cry. “I think they’re following their own path.”

Mon Mothma appears, then, floating through the hordes. Jyn puts her head down, but it’s too late. The senator arrives at their table, and Bodhi sends her a nervous salute. Jyn’s head lolls up to meet her eyes. 

“I have something for you,” Mon Mothma says, words quiet. Still, they cut through the din of the room. “Something that I think would appeal to your particular skill set.”

Jyn says nothing, eyes blank. 

“You don’t have to, of course,” she says. “But if you’d like something a little more titillating than repairing vibroblades all day, then come down to Command Center.”

She turns on her heel without waiting for a response. Jyn looks to Bodhi, and he shrugs while he speaks. “I think it’s worth a debrief at least, don’t you?”

Suddenly, the mess feels close and loud in a way it hadn’t a moment ago. Maybe they actually want to recruit her, she thinks. Or maybe it’s just meant to be a subtle hint that if she’s going to stay, she has to be a little more useful than she is. Either way, the attention is uncomfortable—apparently, she’s less under the radar than she thought she was. 

Not for the first time, she wonders where Cassian is. His voice, his touch, his presence. Alarmingly, his absence follows her around the base, contaminates every breath she takes. 

She looks at the remains of her meal, and rises to her feet wordlessly. Bodhi reaches for her. “Jyn—”

She’s already gone. 

 

 

Back in her room, she finds a figure bent over the sink, spitting blood into the basin. 

“Cassian,” she sighs. Her breath hitches; maybe he doesn’t notice. 

He wipes at his mouth, straightens up from the sink so the light hits his face. The entire left side of it is bruised and bloody. “Jyn,” he says. “You’re back.”

“ _You’re_ back,” she says, and then somehow she’s in his arms, barely touching the floor at all. She doesn’t recall crossing the room. It’s possible they’ve met in the middle. “You came back.”

“Of course,” he murmurs into her hair, like it was nothing. The bruises on his face seem to indicate otherwise. Her hand moves across his shoulder blade and he sucks in a sharp breath. 

“Are you alright?” she asks, withdrawing. 

He nods, his face tight, but doesn’t protest when she directs him to sit on the edge of the bed. It’s a struggle to get him out of his dirty, tattered shirt without causing him more pain. She sits down behind him to get a look at the wound—a fresh, red split in the flesh that’s black around the edges, standing out against the multitude of old white scars that mar the brown skin of his back. She traces one, and can’t stop herself from asking, “How did you get all these?”

“We’ve all spent our fair share of time in Imperial prisons,” he replies, voice hard.

She thinks, for a moment, of asteroids. Maybe he’d understand. 

“Not that it’s an easy life outside of them, either,” he adds, and her hands begin to move. She reaches for the med kit in the drawer of her nightstand.

“I assume you don’t want to go to medbay?” she asks, pulling out a few bacta patches and a sticky bandage. 

“I just want to lie down,” he replies.

_With you_ floats between them, but neither of them says it. 

Jyn looks closer at the wound, at the darkened, cauterized edges. Like something burned as it cut. “Is this from—” She frowns. “This isn’t from a vibroblade, or a blaster.”

He looks back at her, eyes dark. “No, it’s not.”

She takes off the spent bacta patches, the skin now more pink than red, and smoothes a bandage over the scar for good measure. Letting her breath out, she allows her head to fall against the warm skin of his back, her arm coming up to encircle his waist. “Just as long as you come back,” she murmurs. 

He lays a hand over hers, where it rests on his hip. She can’t tell if it’s her hand shaking or his. 

 

 

The sun sets, turning the ice outside their singular window shades of red and orange, until night makes the tundra glow bright white under the moon. Maybe it’s the mess of his face, but she’s never seen Cassian so exhausted. His hand slides along the scratchy blanket over the bed, his expression unreadable. “Is this ours, then?”

She nods toward where she’s stashed his things in the far corner of the room. She’d been afraid, and unsure—convinced, perhaps, that he would arrive, grab his bag, and depart again. “If you want it to be.”

He nods and slips beneath the sheets, curling tight into himself. 

Jyn, after a moment’s hesitation, shrugs out of her jacket, then her boots, and then all the many layers she’s swaddled herself in today. In the cool dark, she joins him beneath the blanket, sliding in close until skin touches skin and limbs tangle together. They’re so close she can feel his breath against her lips, feel the expansion of his chest with each inhalation. He smells of sweat and fire and something else, beneath it all.

The embrace is familiar. Scarif, however, does not invade her mind. For now, the only thing that exists is this moment alone, and the two of them in it.

“Your toes are cold,” he mutters. There’s something like a smile tugging at his lips. 

“I know,” she whispers, and kisses him like it's the last thing she'll ever do.

There’s a split in his bottom lip. She tastes blood, but neither of them pulls away. 

 

 

Even in the absence of Chirrut and Baze, they fall back into parts of their Yavin routine. Draven won’t send Cassian out until he looks less like hell and, for a while, Jyn forgets about Mon Mothma’s offer. Together, they unpack and organize rations, load laundry, empty freshly arrived supply ships. She thinks Cassian would be bursting at the seams by now, desperate for something more stimulating, but he seems sanguine enough. She’s not sure what to make of him not rushing back out into the field the moment she turns her head. 

Instead, new rhythms develop, rhythms that are quieter than any she’s ever known. She can expect, for instance, for Cassian to kiss her goodbye before heading off to the morning’s intelligence briefing with Draven. She can expect to eat with him in the middle of the day, and with Bodhi, too, if he’s not deployed somewhere. She can expect, in the evenings, to return to a warm room filled with orange light. 

At the end of one long, cold day, she’s tripping over herself trying to strip out of her layers, eyes trained on her feet and only vaguely aware of the shape of Cassian. He’s lounging, somewhere over her left shoulder, against the sink, drinking languidly from a mug of something hot. 

“What is wrong with this _fucking_ planet—” she begins to ask, yanking off her gloves, but makes the mistake of looking up before she finishes. 

Cassian is looking at her with amusement, through the steam rising up off his drink. His face has healed enough that, in this light, the yellow of the old bruises is no longer visible, the darkness under his eyes mitigated. He’s wearing an old brown sweater with a geometric pattern around the neck over oil-stained trousers. She’s never been privy to such softness in another human being. At least, not in a long time. 

He might be the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. 

Or maybe it’s the way he’s looking at her—a wondrous mix of fondness and bemusement and absolute trust. He approaches her on soft feet, and she can’t take her eyes off him, not even when he’s just a hair’s breadth away. Her neck cranes back of it’s own volition to meet his eyes. 

“Did you get lonely?” he asks.

Every rational thought has vacated her brain in favor of watching the way his lips curve around each word. She says nothing, until she realizes he’s unfurled his hand between them. In his palm lies a tiny figure, constructed out of spare wire wherever she could find it but, still, undeniably meant to be K2SO. 

“Maybe a little,” she says, finally having the presence of mind to smile coyly, rather than just stare at him in awe. It’d been something to do with her hands, while Cassian was off to Jakku and Bodhi was running missions back and forth between Yavin and Hoth. She hadn’t even realized how much the figure resembled K2 until she’d finished. 

Cassian looks at it for a long moment, some of the sweetness of the moment draining out of his expression. He’s back in it, she knows—Scarif is haunting him again. Both of them. 

“Hey,” she murmurs, raising one hand until she can trail a few fingers down the line of his cheekbone. She pauses at his chin, until his head lifts to meet her eyes. “You’re here. _We’re_ here.”

She doesn’t know where the words come from, but they sound right. Perhaps simple truths are all either of them can handle.

Their eyes still connected, she slips an arm around his waist, finally letting her coat drop to the floor behind her. Eventually, he frees himself from the past enough to return the embrace. It’s not long before he leans down to kiss her, warm and sure, a hand coming up to cup her cheek. Then she’s pulling him backwards, toward the waiting bed but not towards sleep. 

 

 

“I’ve never been with someone that didn’t leave me, in the end,” she’s saying. It’s early morning; the only time such words could fall so freely from her lips. Beneath the heavy blanket, his hand is moving smoothly across the expanse of her muscular thigh, up to her hip and butt and the small of her back, and then down again. The callouses on his palm feel rough and immemorial against her skin. 

He blinks, trying to look impassive. He fails. “I’ve never been with someone that wasn’t taken from me.”

He’s woken up screaming. Neither of them, regardless of strategic sleep deprivation, seem to be able to hold off the horror of the nightmares anymore. She’s not sure he always dreams about Scarif—she doesn’t, either. But she’s afraid to pry, to know even more of the reality he’s hidden from her. Afraid of what sort of secrets he’ll expect in return. 

She’d waited until he’d stop twitching, until his throat was raw, and then drawn him in. Now, his head lays against her chest, his breath rebounding off the skin just below her collarbone. Her hands trace patterns over his back, sometimes following the lines of the scars and sometimes avoiding them completely. 

It’s in this sort of moment that their state of daytime, quasi-domesticity feels most like a farce. Like a lie they can’t afford to live. They’ve both forgotten the nature of their own lives, the risks they’ve committed to just by surrounding themselves with rebels. He is as much a liability to her as she is to him. 

Scarif would’ve been a lucky death; it would’ve been quick, and probably peaceful. Death, here, will not hold any resemblance to such a concept. It will be much worse, she is sure. 

Her chances are spent. 

No, she will not face such luck again. Here, or on whatever world they’ll next encounter darkness, it will be the death she’d always expected for herself—alone, painful, and very soon. Her only hope, now, is that she falls before he does. That, even if it destroys him, maybe he can be the one that holds her while she takes her last breath. 

Even that feels like too much to ask. 

Morning begins to break through the porthole window. Cassian is quiet and still in her arms, but she knows he isn’t asleep. She leans into kiss his hair, inhale his scent. The notion of losing him, of losing these sorts of moments, is not erased by the new dawn. 

 

 

Just by the set of his mouth, she knows what he’s going to say long before he reaches her. 

“When?” she asks simply, voice brittle. 

His face is tight and closed. “Now.”

Her lips part in in indignation—they were meant to have lunch. She’d already had the corner table picked out, the one where they can both have their backs to the wall the way they like it. Bodhi’s off world, flying shotgun next to Shara Bey, probably. It’s easier to focus on a detail as insignificant as this than to contemplate the fact that Cassian’s heading out into nothing, in the way that he always does: indefinitely. 

Not quite gentle, he takes her by the elbow and directs her into an empty corner of an empty hallway. She barely has time to open her mouth—something snarky and biting on the tip of her tongue as the reality of his impending absence gains momentum in her mind. But he smashes their lips together instead, a hand at the back of her neck and an arm snaking around her waist. 

It’s rough, and tastes more than a little desperate on both sides. Jyn’s fingers tangle harshly in his hair, pulling them as close as physically possible. Her back hits the wall behind them, but she doesn’t stop to catch her stolen breath. Through the thickness of her coat, she can feel him gripping her like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to the planet. 

Finally, he pulls away panting, but leaves their foreheads pressed together. Her lips form the words _come back safe_ but instead what escapes into the frosty air is, “Don’t go.”

He won’t meet her eyes. “They need me out there.”

“Really? You’re the Rebellion’s only hope?” she scoffs. “For someone so indispensable they seemed pretty content leaving you to die on Scarif.”

He grits his teeth and sends her an icy glare, but they’re still firmly wrapped around each other. “I don’t expect you to understand,” he mutters, but that old, hollow echo is back—the words don’t mean what they might once have. She can hear the uncertain tremble in his voice. 

“How much more of you are you gonna let them take?” she asks, voice an urgent whisper. 

Cassian bites down hard on his bottom lip and gives his head a brisk shake, pulling away from her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says shakily, and starts off down the hall. 

She watches him go for a moment, then recovers her nerve. “Cassian,” she calls, but the plead in her voice isn’t enough. He turns a corner and is out of sight. 

 

 

It must be Bodhi. 

Bodhi, who grins at the thought of a new assignment. Bodhi, surrounded by the ideals and luxuries he’d been so long deprived of. There’s a purpose in his stride now, something composed and sure in every step. He’s what the Rebellion is supposed to be, she figures—eyes bright, smile brighter, possessed by a glorious and enthusiastic loyalty. He's the pilot. Here, he knows what to do.

Perhaps it’s just that he’s not had to kill anyone with his bare hands yet. 

Regardless, there’s something a little intoxicating about the belonging he’s so clearly found. Something Jyn, undeniably, is intrigued by. It’s not redemption she’s looking for—she’ll never apologize for survival, or the methods by which she’s obtained it over the years—but there’s something to be said for a little direction, these days. A little purpose. 

Or maybe she’s just trying to understand that part of Cassian so inaccessible to her. 

She interrupts a meeting in Command Center the next morning, but Mon Mothma sends her a cool smile, as though she were expecting Jyn’s arrival. Still, Jyn earns herself a curious look from a woman in white with her chin held high, standing imperiously at the head of the table. 

“I’m glad you changed your mind,” Mon Mothma says smoothly, escorting Jyn away. 

Quickly, Jyn is ushered off to one of the intelligence directors. They’ve assembled a team, and Jyn watches them exchange jovialities before they get into the meat of the briefing. She crosses her arms over her chest and memorizes every scrap of information thrown at her. 

She can see why Mon Mothma thinks it would appeal to her—a stealth mission, but with a high likelihood for a certain violence Jyn is particularly well-versed in. It’s a prisoner exchange with a satellite Empire base. Simple, in concept, but apparently with the Empire in a state of temporary disarray there’s a high probability that complications will arise. It’s entirely possible that the whole thing is just an excuse to draw some Alliance forces into a fight, since with the Death Star gone there’s not much reason for the Empire to be civil in a situation such as this. But the prisoners are of enough value to warrant the risk. She, along with most of the team, will be stationed around the drop point, camouflaged in the undergrowth, ready to jump in the moment negotiations fall through. 

“Your first priority is the prisoners,” Draven says. “It’s possible that the Empire will try to take them out before the swap is complete, just so that we gain nothing. So keep an eye out.”

Then, they’re in motion. Things happen fast. She’s given a crash course in the names and ranks of her fellows soldiers. She’s requisitioned camouflage body armor, a rifle, a sidearm, and comm link. There’s also a tablet of something pressed into her palm, clearly meant to be swallowed in the event she is captured. She rolls her eyes at the thought—she’s not lived this long just to go out by her own hand. Saw taught her how to keep secrets, no matter whose they may be. 

Before heading out, she ducks back into her room for a knife to stick in her boot. The one she picks might be Cassian’s; their possessions have started to blend together. The image of him receding into the distance, the anger in his shoulders as he turned the corner away from her, flashes through her mind, but she pushes it aside. 

Finally, she lines her eyes in black. A different kind of armor, for whatever lies ahead. 

 

 

It goes sour almost immediately. 

“You must have a different fucking definition of _stealth_ than I do,” her commanding officer, a woman named Mida, is spitting. They’re under heavy fire from the stormtroopers across the bridge, barely concealed by the underbrush. 

“That Imperial captain drew his blaster,” Jyn replies, through gritted teeth. She ducks as a streak of light goes straight through where her face was a moment before. The side of her head stings. “People were going to die.”

“People _are_ going to die,” Mida growls. “You disobeyed an express order—”

A group of stormtroopers charges, and they both plunge out of the way. Jyn lands on her back and fires into the herd. Something sticky and warm is dripping down the side of her head, but she doesn’t feel any pain yet, only the adrenaline coursing through her veins. Regardless of this shambles of an operation, no one can say that this isn’t a life she knows how to live. 

In the end, most of the team is still alive. However, all the prisoners meant to be exchanged, on both sides, are dead. 

“I’ve never seen Imperial forces in such disarray,” someone is saying, stepping over the body of a stormtrooper splayed across the mouth of the bridge. “No clear chain of command.”

“We’re not much better, though, are we?” someone mumbles, and Jyn can feel the eyes on her back. 

Jyn has no plans to apologize, though—she’d seen what was going to happen, and was in no mood to sit on her ass and let it take its course. The Imperial had pulled his weapon with the intent to take out the prisoners, she was sure, and draw the rest of them into a conflict. So she’d shot him before he got the chance. 

Which is almost exactly when everything went to shit. 

Mida checks the pulse of one of the prisoners they were meant to be extracting, then pats down his pockets. She stands, finally, and fixes Jyn with a look of surprisingly potent fury. “This didn’t have to happen.”

Jyn scowls. “That captain was going to kill—”

“I am fully aware of that,” Mida snarls. “You gave away our position before I could organize a response.”

“While you were ‘organizing a response’, people were going to die,” Jyn retorts. “And I’ve had quite enough of watching people die for one lifetime.”

Mida sweeps a sardonic hand out to indicate the carnage surrounding them. “Well, you’ve done a lot of good.”

The flight back to Hoth is silent, and Jyn spends it bandaging what remains of her earlobe and the patch of her scalp where the blaster round had skimmed her. There’s blood all down her neck, in her hair, soaked into the shoulder of her shirt. It’s a welcome distraction from thinking about what just went down, and whatever hand she had in it. 

Maybe those prisoners were dead men anyways, or maybe not. Maybe there was a greater good to be looked after that she ignored. Either way, she meant what she said: she’s done watching people to die. And any ‘greater good’ is more abstract than ever. 

Regardless, there’s blood on her hands. And it’s not all hers. The realization crawls beneath her skin, even as she tries to swallow it down.

It’s possible she’s not cut out for this. 

Back on the base, she skips the post-mission debrief, and ignores Mida’s grumbled command to go have someone see to her head. She’s aware, on some level, that she looks as though she’s just climbed out of hell itself, but blood and dirt are what she knows—it’s almost a comfort, an insulating layer between her and the rest of the world. She finds herself heading for her room, for the quiet dark, for just a moment to clear her head. 

She finds something else entirely. 

Her mind is far away when the door the slides open; she almost misses the fur-collared coat tossed onto the foot of the bed and the blaster lying next to it. Soon enough, though, she sees him. Cassian is sitting on the floor, head angled down to stare at his hands. It takes her a moment to realize he’s splattered with blood. 

Her heart jumps into her throat. “Cassian, are you—”

“It’s not mine,” he says quietly, without looking up. 

“You’re back,” she says, voice soft. Something in the room feels volatile. “What’s happened?”

He’s barely audible when he replies, shaking his head jaggedly. “I can’t—I don’t think I can—”

Jyn drops her rifle and crosses the room in two long strides. Her head pounds when she leans down to get to his level, but she ignores the pain. The bandage over her ear itches. She covers his hands with hers; sees the dried blood beneath his nails. Jyn doesn’t know what to say, what he needs, so she pulls him forward until his face is buried in her neck. His breaths are quick and ragged against her skin. 

Eventually, he begins to speak. His words are murmured and disjointed, but she gets the gist. An informant on Coruscant—a woman, with a husband and son. He didn’t think they’d wanted to betray him, but someone from Imperial intelligence had gotten their first and deployed troops with the intent to capture him. By the end of it, the family was dead, and the twitch in his hand is enough to indicate that it’s not the stormtroopers who killed them. 

His voice gives out, finally, and she watches him bite down hard on his bottom lip, eyes squeezed shut. They’ve shifted on the floor so that she more comfortably has her arms around him, but he still won’t meet her eyes. 

“I don’t think I can do it anymore,” he says, so softly she almost doesn’t hear. Almost doesn’t believe, either—there’s still the image, in her mind, of the fury she’d inspired in him before he’d gone to Coruscant. “I don’t think there’s anything left.”

_How much more of you are you gonna let them take?_

For a moment, she’s back on Scarif, watching the horizon erupt, facing death and rebirth all at once. The nature of the universe, of her universe as well as his, pivots. Everything changes. 

No one ever seems to know what to do with survivors.

“I should’ve died there,” he says, like he’s reading her mind. “I shouldn’t be allowed a second chance.”

The tragedy, she supposes, is that they’re alive—and the universe has shifted jarringly beneath their feet.

 

 

They don’t sleep. At some point, he sits up, and asks about the wound on her head. She tells him about the mission gone wrong, the dead prisoners, the nebulous greater good. The words spill forth, her throat tightens, but she can’t stop. Somehow, she starts talking about Wobani, and then asteroids. Calmly, his fingers remove the bandage over her head. He cleans the remnants of her ear and the slice through her scalp using a medkit stashed under the bed, and listens. 

“There’s not much of us left, is there?” he asks afterwards, as they lie entangled on top of the sheets. 

“Why are we here,” she says. It’s hardly a question; her tone is flat. She expects him to say something about the cause, about justice, but he doesn’t say anything at all. 

He reaches out, eventually, to smooth a section of her matted hair, and kisses it. The silence stretches between them, comfortable and silken. The peculiar, otherworldly essence of early morning fills in the cracks. “I want you with me,” he murmurs, finally, against her skin. “All the way. Always.”

Before the sun even begins to rise, they’re packing. 

The knock on the door makes both of them jump. It’s Bodhi, though, just returned from Endor, wondering if they’re back on base yet. He takes one look at what they’re doing and his eyes widen. 

“No,” he breathes. “No….no. No, you can’t do this. You can’t leave me. You can’t—not like Chirrut and Baze.”

“Bodhi,” Jyn says, but something cracks in her voice. 

Cassian looks at her, and takes over. He meets Bodhi’s eyes. “You belong here.”

“But Rogue One...we’re in this together,” he replies, eyes following Jyn as she tosses bits and pieces into a duffel. “There’s still so much to be done.”

There’s nothing else to be said, no justification she can voice without losing her grip. Jyn hugs him, and hopes he understands. If anyone deserves to make it out of this war in one piece, she thinks, it’s Bodhi. 

 

 

The halls are empty in the pre-morning gloom. The two of them arrive in the main hangar, bypassing all the combat ships and heading straight for a transport waiting at the end of a row. She’s been eyeing it for months without realizing why, without having any tangible concept of her own intentions for it. It’s a long range freighter, capable of being flown by one person but safer with two. Cassian doesn’t question her choice, doesn’t even pause before typing in his access code to pop open the door to the main body. 

Jyn is ready to follow him inside when she hears soft, swishing footsteps approaching. 

“Shit,” she breathes, when Mon Mothma emerges from the shadows. She should’ve known, she supposes. Cassian knows too many secrets to be allowed the luxury of retirement. Her mind runs through half a dozen lies that might get them off the planet and into the kind of nothing where no one will be able to follow. Before she can open her mouth, though, Mothma speaks. 

“I hope I’ll see you again, someday, on the other side of all this,” she says. Somewhere behind her, the sun has just begun to rise. 

“Draven won’t be happy about the security breach,” Jyn says. 

The other woman fixes her with an even look. There’s reassurance in there, somewhere. “You deserve whatever peace you can find.”

Orange light begins to make it’s way across the duracrete floor. When Jyn looks up again, Mon Mothma has receded back into the shadows of someone else’s world. 

Inside the cockpit, Cassian is already halfway through pre-flight. Jyn looks at the copilot’s seat and asks, “Do you mind if I sit?”

Cassian glances at the empty chair. He’s thinking of K2, she knows. They both are. “Please,” he says, after a beat. She settles in behind controls that have just begun to be warmed by the Hoth sun. 

Between the two of them, they’re in the air in minutes. And then there’s no air left—only a sea of stars just beginning to blur. Cassian looks over at her, uncertainty in his eyes. She reaches for his hand, and hopes it’ll be enough. Hopes that somewhere, out there, is the life she’s supposed to be living. Hopes that she recognizes it when she sees it. Hopes that he’s with her when she does. 

_All the way._

Somewhere, far, far away, there is a land waiting for them—a golden veld, with rivers that criss-cross it like an intricate, unknown stitch. It yearns to become something; something soft, and healing. The light of three suns on the horizon doesn’t burn. It glows. 

It waits.

**Author's Note:**

> _The world was all before them, where to choose_   
>  _Their place of rest, and Providence their guide._   
>  _They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,_   
>  _Through Eden took their solitary way._
> 
>  
> 
> - _Paradise Lost_ , John Milton
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> lafayette1777.tumblr.com


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